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An add-ons marketplace for OpenXava

January 13, 2012

Though OpenXava is already a very powerful application framework that does a lot of things for us, we are always asking for more. We want integrated security, users' management, module navigation, mobile user interface, user interface with Vaadin, automatic generation of web services, access to non-relational database, etc. Implementing all these features requires a big amount of work, therefore we have to figure out an effective way to accomplish all these targets. In my opinion, the option of organizing a group of volunteers to work in these tasks is not feasible, because it's difficult to find someone willing to work during months for free.

In order to grow we need more people working on OpenXava, so we have to incentivize them in someway. One way of doing this is to create an add-ons marketplace where the programmers could develop add-ons for OpenXava and to sell them. This way, the OpenXava application developers will get a lot of useful tools and the most skilled developers will have a chance to make money.

On the other hand, having an add-ons marketplace is a good way to scale the development of OpenXava, because we maintain the core of OpenXava within a reasonable size and we don't need to coordinate a lot of programmers working in the same code. It's a way of descentralizing the development.

In the following weeks we'll add a new section in openxava.org called add-ons. We'll begin with an add-on called NaviOX that will add security and navigation to OpenXava without using a portal. We hope to have a beta of this plugin available in this month. Afterwards, we'll present XavaPhone. This add-ons will generate a mobile UI for your OX application. We expect to publish a beta of this add-on in February.

The idea is to have a marketplace with a high quality commercial add-ons, so we'll revise the quality of each add-on before adding it to the marketplace. Also, we want the add-ons developers to compromize to maintain their add-ons, so they would release new versions with fixes and new features regularly. We'll remove inactive add-ons. That means, we prefer a style that would be more in the line of Apple App Store and not like jQuery plugins.